Look, I wasn’t even getting anything out of it, except for knowing that I
was making her happy.
You see, I’ve been fooling around with ESP experiments most of my life.
Card-guessing, that sort of thing. No, this has nothing to do with any sort of
cult.
I never studied it formally; I’ve read enough to see how little real
substance there is to most of the studies, that the experimenters keep getting
in the way… But that’s beside the point. A lot of the stuff about
telepathy, mind-reading, gets all mixed in with after-death experiences and
ghosts, things that can’t be tied down and measured, and that I can’t see as
being useful.
I’ve always been interested in telepathy just as something physical, one
living brain in communication with another one. My training has been in
biochemistry, and I wondered if there wasn’t some way to use drugs to alter
things a bit and make mind-reading easier and more dependable.
No, I’m not saying that I was on drugs when I did it, not the way you
mean, anyway. The body makes half of what I used, and you can’t ban amino
acids. The rest are things you can buy over the counter of that you need a lot
of skill to make. And it’s the combination that was the key.
I used an analog of curare to speed up neural transmission, a muscle
relaxant, vasopressin, a couple of other things. The idea was to make the
brain more receptive to the thought that you were trying to pick up.
The theory was carefully worked out, though there were a lot of
assumptions that you couldn’t easily test beforehand. It was just luck that I
found something so quickly that worked well.
Yes, yes, I’m getting to why I did it. I’m just trying to tell you how I
got there, that’s all.
My scores on the card-guessing improved a lot. No, there’s no real formal
group, just people I know. There’s no point in giving you their names. They
have nothing to do with what happened later. I haven’t even seen them for a
while.
I found that my abilities improved with practice. Kind of like a muscle.
Actually, I am sure it was a set of neural pathways opening up. First I just
got the Zener symbols, then I picked up numbers, and eventually words. I never
have gotten beyond picking up thoughts on the surface of the mind.
I can’t even do that right now, consistently. The combination wears off
and it’s flushed from the system after a while. There is a residue for a
little longer, which is why I sometimes anticipate your questions.
It’s a good thing that it runs out in time, because I found that it was
hard for me to get much work done when I could hear what people were thinking
around me. Especially since I would often rather not know. And the muscle
relaxant impaired my concentration anyway.
So at first I didn’t use the — potion, I got to calling it — except on
weekends, kind of like LSD was used years ago. To start with, the ESP tests
were on Saturdays, since it was a bunch of friends doing it. And that sort of
social situation led to my discovering a side-effect.
There was a black-haired woman named Janette in the group who was sort of
cute, and I ate dinner with her one night after the ESP test session. I had
known her for a while, never paid a lot of attention to her, but I found her
somewhat attractive.
We talked for a while at her place, and one thing followed another, until
we were in her bed with her legs raised high and me between them. Lying there
afterward, she whispered to me, “You were perfect. You knew exactly what I
wanted done, and just when I wanted you to do it.”
And I realized that, yes, that was exactly what had happened. I had been
trying to see what would please her, and I didn’t notice, during, how well it
was working.
This changed a lot of things for me. I realized that what I had created,
because of how it worked, was a temporary one-way love potion.
Not an aphrodisiac, not exactly. There’s a lot of talk about what love
is, partly because it’s a lot of things. Or gets used a lot of ways. Between
two adults it should mean putting your center outside yourself, putting someone
else’s interests up with yours or ahead of them.
And this way I could know what a women wanted to hear or to do or to have
done to her. This meant that for a woman, as long as we were together and the
potion worked, I was the perfect lover. And she was a very enthusiastic one in
response.
I suppose this meant that I could have had a different woman every night.
That did not interest me, not seriously anyway. I like to have some depth to
my relationships, and I would find getting to know that many women a lot of
work. I’ve only had sex with about eight, in rotation, in the two years since
I discovered the potion.
And most of that was in the eighteen months since I found a full-strength
formula that wore off fast enough so I could work normally the next day.
AIDS? Well, a lot of women worry about that, so they feel good about a
man who discusses it with them. And doing that told me what sort of
reassurance they wanted. So their worry was good for me.
This also meant that I could avoid women who like to do things that might
make them catch it, which are all things I don’t like to do. And I could avoid
women who were into other practices that just don’t interest me.
That was the theory, and it only failed once. And then it was because of
something I almost couldn’t have thought of.
I met Valerie Judge, that woman you found me with, in a singles bar about
six months ago. Normally I don’t go in those places; I have enough to keep me
occupied. But the woman I already had a date with that night had a stomach
virus, and I decided to see what was out there.
I spotted a woman with long blonde hair wearing a peach cotton shift and I
started talking to her. I never really lie to a woman about myself, but I have
no compunctions about saying things the way she likes to hear them, and
certainly I leave out details — like other women. As I said, I like repeat
business a lot more than I do one-night stands.
We went from the bar to a booth pretty quickly. I can hear, both ways,
better when I’m isolated a little. We went from there to a quiet restaurant,
with a table ten feet from anyone else. On the way there I discovered how
Valerie wanted to be held, and as we left I learned just what she wanted my
tongue to do when we kissed. I learned more about her in the cab on the way to
my apartment.
Then I found out exactly how romantic it felt to her to have me pull her
body against mine while I raised her dress and pulled her panties down.
Valerie wanted to have me watch while she took her shift over her head and then
to admire her while she stood naked before a mirror and watched me and my
reflection approach her.
Valerie wanted me to caress the bottoms of her breasts while my tongue was
in her mouth, and later to have me enter her with a motion to first one side
and then the other. And it was very easy to time myself so that out orgasms
came almost perfectly together.
We spent three nights together in my place, over the span of a month, and
then came the time when I made love to Valerie with the usual routine
brilliance in her own bed. When we woke the next morning, she had changed.
The thoughts that she had were not quite the same sort, the reactions were
different, and I found fairly quickly that the sexual tastes were a bit
kinkier. Nothing really extreme, but enough so that I was a little hesitant,
and I would probably have passed over her if I were first meeting her. But
since we were already in bed together, I indulged her.
Valerie was a genuine multiple personality. I never knew if the other
side (or sides, as it turned out) of her had their own names, as with those
cases you hear about. The second one only came out when it was safe, when
Valerie was in her own apartment. This second woman knew of the primary
personality’s activities, but almost entirely as an observer; she almost always
vanished before leaving the apartment, and never was in control for more than a
few hours, always leaving during a nap or doze.
This made me nervous when I worked it out, and I waited until we were back
under my rook before I told Valerie what I had discovered. She was shocked and
did not believe me at first, but she gradually realized that it was the
simplest explanation for the short lapses of memory she had known all her life.
I began now to spend more time with Valerie and to slowly drop the other
women. She was not sure if she should do anything to fuse her personalities,
since she was functioning rather well. I will admit to a thrill in making love
to the same body twice in one day with two different women inside of it.
The other women I knew were interested in a mainly physical relationship,
without plans to settle down soon. But I found myself becoming emotionally
involved with Valerie.
Two months ago I told her about the potion, and I began to give her some
of it. The card results showed up quickly, but it was weeks before she could
read me at all, even with a constant low dose. But once she began she quickly
caught up to me and we moved together, giving each other what we wanted, as
often as our bodies and minds could.
We wanted to spend the Washington’s Birthday weekend together in her
apartment, with both of us taking a heavy dose of the potion and communing in
several ways for the 72 hours. She changed back and forth three times over
that weekend, and it all went very well until Monday when we interrupted the
morning news to spend time on each other and we fell asleep together afterward.
When I woke, she had changed again, and now I know that there was a third
egg within the two outer shells, and it was rotten. I do not know if that
third person gave me some hypnotic drug, or if it was an effect of the large
dose, but I became very suggestible and uninhibited. I started loving her too
much.
She, that third woman, went around the apartment getting out things that I
am certain neither Valerie nor her second self knew were there.
There were handcuffs, restraints, whips… That personality was a very
strong one, but it wanted to be punished for being strong.
I swear that I only gave her what she wanted. It was only because I beat
her unconscious that Valerie could wake up again with those screams that made
her neighbors call the police.
I stopped then. I dropped the whip before you broke in. She didn’t want
it any more.